Governor JB Pritzker was a key ally for President Biden in the Midwest. But now, what does that mean for his relationship with Vice President Harris?

 

COLUMBUS, Ohio ― Democrats were in shock, and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker found himself at the center of the storm.

President Joe Biden’s dismal debate performance in June had cast significant doubt on his ability to defeat his Republican challenger, former President Donald Trump. Pritzker, a fellow billionaire-turned-politician, recognized the danger of Trump regaining power during a particularly vulnerable time for the country.

“So here we sit, a few months out from the election, struggling with the answer to a profound question: How do we save ourselves?” Pritzker asked the Ohio Democratic Party during their annual gathering on a sweltering July afternoon.

Pritzker, the billionaire heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune and a major Democratic fundraiser, struck political gold when Chicago was selected to host the Democratic National Convention. An anticipated 2028 presidential candidate, he had been a staunch supporter of Biden's agenda, particularly among blue-collar voters and independents in the Midwest. Now, he aimed to rally those same voters behind Kamala Harris, using the DNC to showcase his achievements and navigate his own political future with Biden no longer leading the Democratic ticket.

Pritzker urged Democrats to shake off their anxieties. “If we stop worrying about whether they might call us woke and instead focus on actually waking people up,” he said, “if we stopped being so damned afraid of a little chaos and just embraced it as a path from here to there, we will win.”

Pritzker's role in the Biden-Harris campaign had been straightforward: win back disillusioned Democrats, fed-up blue-collar workers, and dissatisfied independents. He campaigned for Biden in Iowa, even when the president wasn’t especially popular after removing the state from Democrats’ early primary lineup. From Illinois, he made frequent trips to key battleground states like Michigan and Wisconsin. He also formed an abortion rights group, which allowed him to expand his outreach to Western and Southern states.

Pritzker leveraged his financial expertise and connections, fundraising for Biden while hinting at a possible presidential bid of his own. His efforts paid off with Chicago hosting the next Democratic National Convention, giving him a larger platform to highlight his record. However, the two-term governor and Biden campaign adviser found himself in political limbo. The Democratic Party was paralyzed, and campaign funds were dwindling. “A lot of people were almost assuming that there was no way we could win this election,” former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland recalled. Pritzker “encouraged us to move beyond that.”

While Pritzker’s remarks were timely, he couldn’t foresee the chaos that would soon unfold.

Within hours, Trump was shot at a campaign rally. A week later, Biden, stricken with COVID, withdrew from the Democratic ticket. The 2024 campaign was turned on its head.

Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor, a stunning reversal that gave Democrats a chance to unite behind a new candidate. “It’s turned out that people have put their anxiety away, and now, we have a great candidate and people are pulling together,” Pritzker said in an interview in Chicago.

But for the first time since his 2017 gubernatorial run, Pritzker faced questions about his political future, and he had less than a month to organize a presidential nominating convention.

**Biden’s Man in the Midwest**

It didn’t take much to convince Pritzker to get on board. 

He attended his first Democratic National Convention in San Francisco in 1984 as a 19-year-old volunteer for Walter Mondale’s campaign. Pritzker was a bit of a convention junkie. “I called JB and said, ‘Hey, I've got a crazy idea. What do you think of this?’” recalled Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a co-chair of Biden’s—and now Harris’s—campaign. “He said, ‘Absolutely.’”

Chicago had hosted Democratic conventions nearly a dozen times before, most recently in 1996 for Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign and in 1968 during the Vietnam War protests, which led to clashes with the police. This time, party officials insisted, would be different.

However, there were challenges from the start. The bid required the city to provide an irrevocable $30 million letter of credit in case the host committee fell short of its nearly $85 million obligation—a record-breaking sum—and to convince party officials to choose Chicago over Atlanta, Houston, and New York.